Continuum: Beyond Picturesque

From 1900, academically trained artists migrating to Taos brought with them seeds of French modernism. Several of those who would form the Taos Society of Artists (1915-1927) had passed through the Académie Julian in Paris, the progressive academy that by 1880 had displaced the official École des Beaux-Arts as the destination of American and other foreign students working alongside the likes of Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Henri Matisse, and Marcel Duchamp.

Having encountered the Academie’s openness to Manet, impressionism and Postimpressionism, Taos Society founders Joseph Henry Sharp, Ernest Blumenschein, Bert Phillips, followed by New York artists Robert Henri and John Sloan, would find their progressive notions of ordinary subject matter and its treatment at first tested and then transformed by the local landscape and its peoples. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.